storing html page with images in a database

[SRM]

I'm working on a system that creates html reports with graphs as
dynamically created images. We need to archive these reports in a
database for later retrieval.

Currently we just store the html as text in the database and the
graphs get recreated every time the report is viewed. This has the
limitation that any changes to the graph creation engine need to be
backward compatible with all the existing reports. To get around this
we are investigating the option of storing the graph images with the
html in the database.

It would be great if we could store the html and image files together
in one blob using something like a web archive (.MHT) or ZIP file,
especially as we are going to introduce PDF reports in the near
future, so we'll need to move from text to binary storage anyway.

Has anyone done something similar? I'd appreciate any thoughts or
previous experiences.

 

[Göran Andersson]

I'm working on a system that creates html reports with graphs as
dynamically created images. We need to archive these reports in a
database for later retrieval.

Currently we just store the html as text in the database and the
graphs get recreated every time the report is viewed. This has the
limitation that any changes to the graph creation engine need to be
backward compatible with all the existing reports. To get around this
we are investigating the option of storing the graph images with the
html in the database.

It would be great if we could store the html and image files together
in one blob using something like a web archive (.MHT) or ZIP file,
especially as we are going to introduce PDF reports in the near
future, so we'll need to move from text to binary storage anyway.

Has anyone done something similar? I'd appreciate any thoughts or
previous experiences.

Why not store the images in a separate table (or at least as separate
items in the table)?

If you put the html code and the images in an achive in the database,
you will have to unpack the same archive several times when you display
the page. The browser will request the images separately, and you will
have to unpack the archive once for each image that is requested.